Friday, April 22, 2011

It is a glorious day today. Not just because we get reminded that some nice bloke took the trouble of dying for our inability to resist forbidden apples from smooth-talking serpents. But because I have my life back. My company launched our new site this week, and I finally feel like I found a grove of banana trees to satisfy the monkey that’s been screeching on my back for two months.

Of course, I’ve now entered the “looks great, here’s something I found wrong” phase of the project, but that’s so much easier to deal with than preparing to launch a site.

Tune time....

1) “Letter to My Son,” Bloc Party. Dear Jesus, I’m really sorry you have to go through with this whole crucifixion thing. At the time, the idea of original sin seemed pretty damn original, and I was still a swinging single God, not a Father, so having to send my Son to die for the sins of my creation didn’t seem like a big deal. I wouldn’t call it an oversight because I don’t make those, but I certainly wish I could go back and rethink the process. Problem is, if I did that, those idiots would definitely think I was making a mistake and we can’t have that. So off you go. And no, I can’t send the Holy Spirit, because he’d just freak everyone out and besides, they’d never get the nails through. Love, Your Father Who Art Still in Charge.

2) “Heaven and Hell,” The Who. LOL, iTunes is on a mission from God today. John Entwistle was a funny, funny guy. This is such a great poke at the concept of the afterlife. Of course, I hope the afterlife exists because it’s the only chance I have of seeing the original Who live. Or would that be dead?

3) “Burial,” Peter Tosh. Okay, now iTunes is kind of freaking me out a little bit. Does Genius recognize holidays? Is it building me a special Stations of the Cross playlist? Should I expect to hear Rush’s “The Trees” next Arbor Day?

4) “Shaky City,” The Plimsouls. We have returned to your regularly scheduled secular programming. No vid for this one, so we'll go with the hit.

5) “Mykonos,” Fleet Foxes. The Lovely Becky and I officially rejected the new IFC sitcom Portlandia. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a sketch show from Saturday Night Live’s Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, guitarist of the late, great Sleater-Kinney. They do pieces about Portland specifically and about liberal/progressive culture in general. I love the idea of mocking those things, because it’s good to have your sacred cows roasted. One of my favorite SNL sketches of all time is “Dukakis After Dark” which skewered so many late-80s liberal icons. The problem with Portlandia is that, while it’s very creative and the ideas are original, there are no jokes. We watched an episode where Aimee Mann was working as a housekeeper because the music industry is in the toilet, and while clever, it wasn’t funny, which is important if you’re writing “comedy.” Anyway, this song made me think of that because Fleet Foxes are such a tailor-made NPR liberal band who would be kind of a joke if they weren’t so fucking awesome.

6) “Dear Prudence,” The Beatles. I am a big Beatles fan but not a big White Album fan. Obviously classic, original, groundbreaking, Rolling-Stone-spongeworthy, etc. but much like Portlandia, while I appreciate it, I never found it that much fun to listen to over the years. Well, I was playing some Beatles songs for Libby and played this one, which she liked. I hadn’t heard it in a while and was sucked in by the off-kilter beauty of it. I wound up listening to the whole album again and realized I was completely wrong about it. Except for “Revolution 9,” that sucks just as much as I remember.

7) “Too Much Too Young,” The Specials. With TLB and I both turning 40, we’ve talked lately about being older parents. When we both married at the age of 23, while we didn’t expect to rush right out and start begetting, I don’t think either of us expected to be chasing after a toddler when we were 40. Our parents both had us in their early 20s, so by the time they were 40, we were on our way out the door, not trying to learn how to poop on the potty (well, at least TLBwasn’t). I definitely wish I had the energy I had when I was younger, as I sometimes feel like I’m not active enough with Libby even if I try my best to be. Sometimes Daddy just needs to have a drink and let Yo GabbaGabba do the baby driving. At the same time, I feel like I got so much stuff out of my system before being a parent. I felt ready and dedicated by the time I held my child in my arms the first time, and in my case, I think that was the right path for me. Even if that means I might be having to poop in a diaper by the time she’s potty training her kids.

8) “Saving My Face,” KT Tunstall. I know this song is about as heavy as a grande skim latte with fat-free whip cream, but I really like her voice. It’s not always easy to be charming when singing.

9) “Safe European Home,” The Clash. There’s a great dual-dynamic to the lyrics here. On the one hand, Strummer seems to be poking a pointed stick at the classic white European fear of vacationing among non-whites. At the same time, he seems to be acknowledging that there is some reason for that fear, that if you poke your jolly sunburned face around certain parts of Kingston, you’re going to be wishing you were back in your safe European home. On top of that, it flat-out rocks, too.

10) “Redmen and Their Wives,” Guided by Voices. I think the concept of the farewell tour should be abolished completely. Case in point: Guided by Voices touring just a few years after their Electrifying Conclusion tour, on their unofficially titled We Could Use the Beer Money Tour. And that’s fine: I love that bands get back together and go back out on the road. I don’t even care if they get back together for the money. I like money, so I appreciate the motivation, and as long as it is convincing, I don’t mind someone faking enjoyment for my benefit. Just don’t call it your final tour unless you all plan to kill yourselves after the last encore.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Yesterday was a special day for The Lovely Becky. She turned 40, and what’s particularly amazing about it is how aging does not phase her at all. I have never met anyone who welcomes getting older more than my lovely wife. She greets every birthday with open arms, whereas I tend to run from them like a half-naked teenager fleeing Jason in Friday the 13th, only to get impaled just as I reach the boathouse and think I’m safe. In addition to providing the usual heartfelt birthday wishes, I also remarked, “Wow, this means I’ll never again have sex with someone under 40.” Which is also a good way to ensure you will never have sex again.

In her honor, and out of respect for the three people who may be reading this, I also promise today’s list will be Rush free, despite my being still higher than Geddy Lee’s voice from the show the other night.

2) “Brass Monkey,” Beastie Boys. This is when I miss having a subwoofer on my PC. I feel like I’m cruising around San Diego with my friends looking for someone to buy us beer.

3) “Black,” Pearl Jam. From so Jazzy Jeff to so Debbie Downer. This is my favorite Pearl Jam song, due in no small part that I can do a reasonable job singing it, especially the final verse (I know some day you’ll have a beautiful life etc.). That’s a pretty small group of songs.

4) “Cocaine Blues,” Johnny Cash. One of the first songs Libby loved, courtesy of my mother-in-law who always played her best of Johnny Cash CD. This song would start and she would begin dancing in a circle around the room while Johnny Cash told his tale of chemical abuse, murder, and incarceration. Now there’s a kid’s show I would watch.

5) “Surfing With the Alien,” Joe Satriani. One of my favorite guitar instrumentals. Impressive while also being expressive, with a couple of dazzling solos that dance with the song instead of hitting it over the head, throwing it in the trunk of a car, and speeding off into Wank Canyon.

7) “Peek-A-Boo,” Siouxsie & the Banshees. Oh, how TLB used to dance to this. In fact, TLB was quite the dancer. We used to go dancing at this rancid hole-in-the-wall of a club, the kind of place where you could walk into the bathroom and offer someone $10,000 to do ten pushups and they would turn it down. It was redeemed by its high-alcohol/low-dollar drink quotient and the fact that it played great music, including my first encounter with New-Wave themed nights. Anyway, TLB would just throw herself into whatever was playing, and her head would be this twirling mass of copper hair (her bottle preference at the time). I always marveled at how she could do that. For me, dancing, like many other aspects of my life, is marred by my self-consciousness. Apparently I will do almost anything for a laugh except dance like a white guy who can’t dance.

8) “E-Pro,” Beck. I expected this Friday to be D-Day +2, two days after I triumphantly finished my work project and basked in the glow of a successful new Web site, a day where I would be doing the Random 11 while drunk and possibly pantsless (sorry, but sometimes a fella just needs to feel free). Unfortunately, after several hours of trying the other night, we had to call it quits. There’s nothing quite like working until 1:30 in the morning only to realize it was all for naught and you get to do it again. Yay! It’s also awesome when a technical person is explaining the reason for said problem and you can’t understand a thing they said. I may as well have had a Finnish person telling me I had cheese popcorn dust all over my face. Come to think of it, that would have been better, because at least it meant I had been eating cheese popcorn.

9) “Wrong,” Archers of Loaf. Nineties revival has arrived. I’ve purchased a couple of recent albums where the barely-able-to-shave musicians sound like they are trying to sound like this song. Which is good, because this song is fucking awesome. However, it’s also alarming, because it means that the Retro boat is sailing past the 80s, and the next port of call is Oldies. I’m not ready to be old enough to have the music of my youth be considered something with “old” in the classification.

10) “Charm Attack,” Leona Naess. Sounds a bit like what I imagine Sinead O’Connor would have sounded like if she had grown up in L.A. instead of Ireland. There’s a very factory-produced flavor to this, without much originality, but it’s put together well and gets me tapping my foot and turning it up whenever it plays. That also could serve as a metaphor for why I like eating at The Cheesecake Factory as much as I do.

11) “Bulletproof,” LaRoux. Not only did I never like Yaz, I used to do a an imitation of Alison Moyet to express my displeasure with Yaz. Yet I not only crank this Yaz-clone every time I hear it, I often play it two or three times in a row. I think the singer’s hair cast some sort of spell on me. It’s especially awesome to turn it to the point where it’s a shade under too loud and sit at the sweet spot between the speakers, letting the synths jump around from left to right. A very nice way to cap the list.

Friday, April 08, 2011

Project completion/salvation, thy name is next Wednesday. A day when I can stop thinking about headlines and HTML and get back to blogging about boobies and boners. Incidentally, Arthur C. Clarke is a moron. He thought computers would be able to hijack manned expeditions to Jupiter when they can't even explain to me why my Website keeps crashing. SPEAK ENGLISH OR DIE, HAL, YOU 'RUNTIME ERROR UP YOUR DINGLEBERRY NODE' MOTHERFUCKER!

I do actually hate to be a big baby about all this. In all honesty, this site launch is going much better than the last one I had to do a few years ago. It's been a lot of work but the payoff will be that my job will actually get easier once I get done. The problem is that I am what the French call layzee d'inherent, so I tend to bitch a lot when I work a lot.

However, in addition to soon having more time to spend with family, friends, and captioned pictures of kittens, I have two other fun things awaiting me this month. Next week, I will be seeing a certain Canadian power trio who have been called, "the greatest rock and roll band in the known multiverse."1 I can think of few ways to celebrate the end than "In The End":

Note: This is unfiltered Geddy, so do not play near glass objects or in the presence of dogs (especially of the snow2 variety).

Then, at the end of the month, I have another Vegas trip, the first since fatherhood. We are celebrating the pending nuptials of my cousin Youngblood, and plan on throwing him into a waterproof marriage sack full of vodka and making him drink his way out. For extra bonus corruption at no charge, his brother Zoolander will be attending as well, mere days after he turns 21. Our3 goal is to make sure that while Youngblood and Zoolander look exactly the same on the outside, their souls will be unrecognizable to their respective love interests. Depending on how much we drink/how much we lose at the tables, we may also entertain ourselves by channeling Danny Gans via Ouija. Although being possessed by him would probably cause my head to spin around while I did a bad impersonation of a possessed Austin Powers speaking backwards Latin.

Seeing as I am a just and loving blogger, I will provide an alternative soundtrack for those who aren't through being cool about Rush.

1Brando, "The light at the end of the chunnel", Journal for same-sex country-and-western-dancing, 2011.

2You've been rushrolled.

3Mine and Tickle's and whomever else wishes to join in the corruption of two pretty straightforward young men with impressive abs.